The few surviving installments of the legendary syndicated old-time radio program, in which Jean King, as Lonesome Gal, fashioned a fifteen-minute-daily persona as the kind-of virtual girl friend to thousands of lonely male listeners in the 1950s. Her trademarks included brief talks between music selections, talks that usually (but not always) ended in a conversational reference to the coming song's title. She even cut a record of her theme song, "Lonesome Gal"---as did Margaret Whiting, Dinah Shore, and Teresa Brewer.

She habitually appeared in a cat-eye shaped mask for personal appearances to preserve the mystique at the height of her show's popularity. Created while she was herself lonely in Dayton, Ohio, after a none-too-successful try as an actress in California, King brought the show to Los Angeles and syndicated it around the country with the help of the "Dragnet" radio producer she eventually married.

This set includes two selections from 1949 in which the music was excised but King's talks, complete with Bond Street Tobacco commercials woven in, remain intact. They had no titles originally; I chose to name them as best I could for the titles of the first songs in her set; the exception is a show in which she actually presented Sarah Vaughan as the performer of the song---customarily, she did not mention the performer on the records she played during the show.

The sound quality of most of these shows is very muddy, but for private listening you can hear the half-honeyed, half-smoky voice and gentle romanticism this woman provided. Decades before anyone ever heard of the Internet, this was virtual seduction, albeit seduction that stopped well short of outright sexuality. In more ways than one, "Lonesome Gal" may have been the last of the classic radio romantics.

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